As the next part of my series of posts about my new Vye S37, I initially started to write up a detailed description of the process of configuration and system setup. After a short time, I found that I was even boring myself. Therefore, I’m going to instead just share some overall observations on my first week of use. I’m going to take a bit of a stream-of-consciousness approach here, so hopefully it won’t be too rambling.
More on the Keyboard
In my last post, I already talked a bit about my early experiences with the keyboard. The presence of the keyboard definitely is the biggest difference compared to my previous UMPC and I’m already seeing a substantial change in my use patterns. With the eo, I found that I generally used it primarily as a sort of a combination of a web browsing device (essentially a MID) and an MP3 player. When I bought it, I had visions of using it more for writing than I ever did. The truth is that I never really got the hang of making handwriting recognition work. Even with the improvements in Vista, I still had to make a huge number of manual corrections. Even short discussion board posts, blog comments, or even emails took a ridiculously long time.
Thoughts on the MacBook Air
Thursday, January 24th, 2008I’m going to take a short break from my ongoing reports on my new Vye S37 to write a bit about the mobile computing device that is getting the most attention right now. I’m referring to Apple’s MacBook Air ultra-portable, which was announced with quite a bit of fanfare during Steve Jobs’ annual keynote speech at the MacWorld Expo.
I’m certainly not a big Apple fan and the MacBook Air definitely wouldn’t fit my own personal needs (its footprint is way too big, for one thing), but I do think it looks like a reasonably decent device that should be a good fit for some users. It has received a fair amount of criticism from some quarters, but I think most of its shortcomings are just examples of the types of compromise that has to take place when portability is a primary focus for the device. Every such design has to require a fair amount of give and take. Some potential customers will not be able to get by with the compromises that Apple chose to make, but those same concerns will be less important to others.
The key issue with the MacBook Air is really one that is inherent to Apple’s computers in general: the Mac OS remains a closed platform inextricably tied to a single manufacturer’s hardware. Competition is one of the main things that makes the compromises on mobile PCs tolerable. As noted in my recent post outlining the factors that led to my decision to purchase my Vye S37, there were all kinds of factors that led to my rejection of other decent systems in favor of the one that most closely matched what I wanted. This was made possible by my preference for using an OS that woks on hardware from a wide variety of companies.
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